Mayor's song of myself

A battery of cameras pointed at him like a high-tech firing squad, the mayor-for-another-week had a lot of last words.

The resignation speech of Mayor Bob Filner was like a disco ball, casting fascinating, if distorting, rays of light all over the chambers.

If you were expecting a lovelorn wreck, you got him, his voice cracking as he professed his adoration for his short-term first lady, Bronwyn Ingram, the younger fiancée who broke off their engagement and shared with the world sordid details of the mayor’s philandering, a major catalyst of the torture that would ensue.

If you were expecting the slippery penitent, you heard from him, too, referring to his “personal failings” and his taking “responsibility” (a term of defensive art), and apologizing to “all the women I offended,” another lawyerly deflection from self-evidently boorish actions.

If you were expecting Bob Filner the fighter, you got him, bloody and unbowed, framing the city’s leaders and media as a hysterical lynch mob treating as gospel allegations, “not one (of which) has ever been independently verified.”

If you were expecting the political strategist, a brawler who has never lost an election, you got that, too, when he conceded that he gave “well-organized interests” hungering for a “political coup” the “weapons they needed” to wield “in a bloody and vicious way.”

If you were expecting self-psychology, reflections on his desire to form “personal relationships,” you got it when he blamed everything on his “awkwardness and hubris,” a bizarre coupling of adolescent twitchiness with the classical character defect of supreme arrogance. (As he has said often, Filner thinks of himself as a nerd, but as mayor, he became an omnipotent nerd.)

If you were expecting the self-inflating politician, framing himself as a 21st century Pericles overseeing the Golden Age of San Diego, you got that when he called upon all San Diegans to go to Plaza de Panama to experience its car-free glory or the La Jolla Cove to breathe in the poop-less sea breeze.

If you were expecting the working-man’s hero, a protector of vets and the homeless as well as labor’s champion, you got that when he thanked unions for sticking by him and encouraging him to get treatment. (If the 70-year-old has a quasi-political future, guess where it is.)

If you were expecting the tweedy university professor with the long, really long, view of history, you got that when he urged the City Council, staring at him without expression, to read “The First Industrial Revolution,” an economic textbook about the 19th century published in ... 1980.

If, however, you were expecting poetry or wistfulness about the future, the mayor did not pull a Gen. Douglas MacArthur and muse about old politicians fading away in a poignant twilight of, let’s say, a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter.

If you were expecting gratitude that the city would defray some of his legal expenses, possibly saving himself from bankruptcy, you didn’t hear that. He earned that money with his resignation.

If you were expecting humor, he did not fall back on his typical wisecracking for which he’s infamous because, let’s face it, “this is not a happy time for any of us.”

If you were expecting the short-time mayor to call out by name and apologize to the women who have stepped into the headlights and accused him of gross behavior, you were expecting too much.

If you were expecting jeers and catcalls to be directed at a resigning mayor who almost certainly would have been recalled if need be, you did not hear it in a room sprinkled with citizens, many of them minorities, expressing support with muted cheers and amens.

And finally, if you were thinking I’d take any pleasure in writing this column about the third mayor pressed into resignation in 30 years, think again.

I’ve hated this story, historic as it is, from Day One.

In the end, the best that can be said of Mayor Bob Filner’s speech is that it’s over.